


Emotional Reossification, Or: It's Not That Simple

by EssayOfThoughts



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Snark, Trauma, discussion of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 02:56:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9052438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: They don’t think about it much, Sam and Bucky. They’re friends of a sort, debating and discussing trauma and “what about when we do hurt ourselves, isn’t that, like, compounding the trauma?”“Man,” Sam says. “You are sometimes full of shit. Today is not one of those days.”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [malapropism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/gifts).



> For my dear friend Kate. I hope you have a lovely Christmas.
> 
> I listened to [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tha8j0VJgA) and [This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJPc49z57bU) while writing this.

Sometimes Bucky is amazed at the team’s functionality. Given the myriad traumas they have - and, for many, happening in quick succession, compounding like fracturing glass - their ability to handle things astounds him.

By all logic, with all they’ve each been through, they should barely be functional. That they aren’t catatonic with stress and trauma, that they don’t  _ become _ so…

Bucky thinks this is both their curse and their sole saving grace.

“I swear,” he tells Sam one evening. “Our brains are broken. Not because of trauma, hell no. Before that. The way our brains respond to trauma has got to be fucking  _ wrong.” _

“Nah,” Sam says. “There’s no wrong way to respond to trauma. Just ways which are harmful and ways which aren’t.”

Bucky looks at Sam, reclining on the balcony of the rooms T’Challa gave them, watching the stars and sipping a beer. 

“Bullshit,” Bucky says.

 

* * *

 

Sam may be wrong. Bucky knows that Sam is  _ probably _ right. Sam is the therapist after all. 

“So,” he says to Sam, while they watch Clint slowly convincing Wanda that she’s safe, that she can speak and not be shocked. “If it’s divided between harmful and non-harmful responses to trauma, I mean. We’ve gotta be harmful, right? Maybe not always to others but  _ definitely _ to ourselves. Right?”

Sam eyes him warily. “Is this gonna turn into a debate.”

“What? No! I wanna know. I mean. Running headlong into danger isn’t a healthy response, right? Shoving away trauma  _ in order _ to run face first into trouble isn’t non-harmful, right?” Bucky knows he’s putting on his best earnest expression, but he  _ is. _ “I mean.  _ Adrenaline junkie _ isn’t a compliment, is it?”

“Nooo,” Sam says slowly. “Do you  _ seriously _ wanna sit down and discuss trauma recovery? And how we’re all fucked in the head?”

Bucky looks around, Wanda walking slowly beside Clint, speaking in a hoarse voice, the great carved panther in the distance, the sky above them. “I mean,” he says. “It’s not like there’s much  _ else _ to do.”

 

* * *

 

They’re playing paintball with an unsuspecting Steve… well. They’re about to prank Steve mercilessly with paintball guns and pellets when Bucky presses his comm.

“Look,” he says. “This can’t be a sensible way of dealing with trauma.”

To be fair, he’s still watching down the scope.

“Man,” Sam says, laughing. “Shut the hell up. You gonna shoot first, or am I?”

Bucky hits Steve’s shirt dead centre, moments later Sam’s shot follows. 

Then, for good measure, Bucky shoots Sam too.

“Man!” Sam says. “You dick!” But he’s laughing.

“I told you,” Bucky says, grinning. “Not a sensible way to deal with trauma. Who’s to say who I’ll randomly shoot next?”

 

* * *

 

Bucky doesn’t know it yet, but this is the first time Sam thinks  _ maybe _ of kissing him.

 

* * *

 

“Trauma…,” Sam gestures with dark hands. “It’s not simple, or straightforward. And I mean, yeah, a lot of the stuff we, as a team do? Has not been healthy. I mean Steve running after you as he did was. Like. Entirely due to the particular way in which his head is fucked. So, I mean. We  _ all _ need help, but at the same time it’s not  _ only _ that simple. Some of it is coping mechanisms.”

“Running headfirst into danger is a coping mechanism?” Bucky asks, deadpan.

“In a way,” Sam says. “Like. You remembered who you were but you still went back into the place that took that from you in the first place to help Steve, to try to save the world. Even though that wasn’t necessarily healthy for you.”

Bucky sits, stretches out his new arm to Sam to pass him a fresh beer.

“But that,” Bucky says. “It’s not that simple. I didn’t wanna go there, but we couldn’t risk Zemo getting the other soldiers. If I didn’t go, if Steve couldn’t stop them or  _ find _ them, that’d have been on me.”

“See?” Sam says. “We have bigger reasons to fight. So even if it’s horrible for us we have a bigger purpose, a responsibility and that lets us focus not on the trauma. And if we do it enough the trauma we attach to it isn’t so severe, because we have many more recent non- or not-as-traumatic memories attached to it.”

Bucky frowns. “That still doesn’t sound very healthy,” he says dubiously. Sam shrugs.

“Some people think it can make shit worse. Some people think it helps. I figure: it depends on the person. For those of us with a Saving People thing, or dragged along in Steve’s wake… it tends to help.”

Bucky’s eyebrows are raised. Sam matches him.

“Doubting me, Winter Popsicle? Example other’n us: Look at Wanda. You know she lost her brother the first time she fought alongside the team? Her twin brother, the only family she had left in the world. She was a wreck for weeks. You know what pulled her out of that? Training. She buried it all beneath training and this like. Adamant certainty that she wasn’t gonna let anyone else die like that again.”

Bucky is silent. 

“She saved Steve in Lagos,” he says eventually.

Sam nods. “And most of the market, for that matter.”

“The Wakandan’s deaths must have killed her.”

Sam shrugs but Bucky knows the look in his eye. It says:  _ Why do you think she didn’t fight to get free sooner? _

 

* * *

 

“Nightmare?” Bucky asks when Sam shuffles into the common area at ass o’clock in the morning. 

“Don’ ask,” Sam says. “Coffee.”

Bucky rises, pulls down a mug, pours from the jug, slides warm ceramic over hard marble.

Sam’s eyes fix on the pitch-dark coffee, his hands wrap around the pale ceramic of the mug. He breathes in the smell of coffee and sighs.

“I could kiss you,” he says, and Bucky is half-sure he doesn’t know he’s said that aloud. He shrugs.

“I know nightmares,” he says. “Got plenty of my own.”

Sam’s eyes are quietly watchful over his mug.

“Yeah,” he says softly. “Wanna talk about it?”

Bucky laughs. “And sound like a wimpy sap? Nah, I’m good. You?”

Sam shrugs. “Same nightmare I ever have. Coffee’ll help ‘til morning.”

Bucky’s words are unusually well considered as he asks, “Wanna watch something for a bit?”

 

* * *

 

They fall asleep when they game they were watching segues into news and then into some documentary, an old English man’s quiet voice gently soothing them. Bucky’s head rests on Sam’s shoulder, Sam’s cheek presses to Bucky’s hair.

They only wake hours later because Wanda drops a mug.

 

* * *

 

Clint’s there in a moment, picking up the sherds, toeing out of his plimsolls to lend to Wanda so she doesn’t cut her bare feet. Bucky’s up in a moment, his cup of (cold) coffee scooped up from the table. Wanda’s hands are shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I only- It slipped-”

“Shh, kiddo,” Clint says, gentle to her as Sam knows he is to his own kids. He presses a kiss to her forehead, gentle and fatherly. “It’s ok. I’ll sort this out. Wilson, Barnes, could one of you get Wanda some tea?”

Bucky walks over almost automatically. Clicks the kettle on, pulls down a mug and the tea caddy, drops a bag into the cup and tops up his own coffee. It’s Sam who stretches, topples himself gracefully over the back of the sofa and gently sits Wanda on a stool.

“Was it your scarlet?” he asks lowly. “Is it coming back?”

Wanda shrugs, murmurs in Sokovian that Bucky’s Asset can almost parse before she sees Sam’s bafflement and switches to English. “I don’t know,” she says. “I wasn’t-” she wriggles her fingers at her head, as though calling her scarlet, but none comes, “- all here.”

The kettle clicks off and Bucky pours Wanda’s mug. The scent of mint and chamomile fills the kitchen area.

They leave quietly when Clint finishes cleaning up. He sits opposite Wanda and cups her shaking hands in his, and they take it for what it is: a signal to go.

 

* * *

 

“Barton handles his issues by helping Wanda with hers, doesn’t he?”

Sam doesn’t expect the question when it comes but he nods.

“It’s…,” Bucky starts. “It’s like running headfirst into your trauma for another’s cause. You’re helping them to work through their stuff so when your own stuff comes up you don’t have to focus on it. And that makes it okay.”

Sam smiles, nods again. “I told you,” he says. “Trauma is weird. We all have our own ways of coping.”

 

* * *

 

It’s nice, talking to Sam. Hell, it’s nice hanging out with Sam and snarking with Sam and planning pranks to play on Steve when he gets back with Sam.

It’s the rest of it that’s not so simple.

 

* * *

 

He’s watching the rain polish the panther to a shine when Wanda, quiet as a ghost, pads up beside him and curls up in the chair beside his. She’s dressed in red - red-orange sarong, red shirt so dark it’s almost black as blood, drapey red cardigan. It’s like she’s trying to draw her still-erratic scarlet out by wearing it.

“Maybe I am,” she whispers, and curls her hands under and around her feet and rocks slightly side to side. “It only seems to come out when it wants to.”

He hasn’t seen Wanda this lucid in a while. She was briefly like this when they’d brought him out of cryo, just long enough for her to use her erratic scarlet to rip HYDRA’s programming from his brain, but since, with no focus…

“I’m,” she waves her fingers either side of her head. “Not always here. It’s. Easier in other heads. Some of you are. Less broken. Or. Know how to deal with being broken.”

“Clint,” he says. “Sam.”

It’s only as she says, “ _ Da, _ ” that he realises she’s been speaking the same bastard variant of Russian that Asset likes to slip into.

He supposes they each have their caretakers, of a sort, who help them stay present and think straight.

_ “Da,” _ Wanda says again. “But it is not that simple.”

Well. Given she’s answering his  _ thoughts _ he figures she has a better idea than he.

“Tell me?”

Wanda shrugs. “Caretakers is. Not entirely right. It’s not that simple.” She pauses, drags her fingers between her toes, tilts her head on her knees, chin in the gap. Her expression is fond. “Clint owes me a debt. My brother died for him. It is. He feels responsible. And now. He broke in to help me break out. And then. Straightjacket. Shock collar. He blames himself. He tries to make up for it.”

“And Sam?” Bucky asks. For the first time he’s seen, Wanda cracks a smile.

“He thinks you are not so much the troublemaking asshole you were. And he likes you.”

Bucky relaxes back in his chair. “It is good to know you have friends,” he says.

“More than friends,” Wanda says. “We are all almost family.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t think about it much, Sam and Bucky. They’re friends of a sort, debating and discussing trauma and “what about when we  _ do _ hurt ourselves, isn’t that, like, compounding the trauma?”

“Man,” Sam says. “You are sometimes full of shit. Today is not one of those days.”

Bucky likes Sam’s smile, bright teeth against dark skin, the way his face wrinkles to accommodate his laugh. 

He doesn’t know this: Sam likes his argumentativeness, and how it’s coupled to a relentless, unforgiving sense of humour.

 

* * *

 

“God, just  _ kiss _ already,” Clint says one morning and Bucky’s mind goes back to the night of nightmares, Sam’s sigh and soft whispered  _ “I could kiss you.” _

He smiles slowly. “Well, Sam?” he says, turning. “What do you think?” He puckers his lips.

“Not,” Sam says, jabbing a cereal-full spoon at him, “While you have oatmeal in your hair, dude, that’s disgusting.”

Bucky finds the strands, sucks the oats off them and smiles at Sam. “Now?”

Sam grins, eyes laughing. “Brush your teeth first. Then we can talk about it.”

 

* * *

 

He brushes his teeth. They don’t talk about it.

For a while there’s nothing but the soft sound of lips on lips and quiet breathing.

 

* * *

 

Wanda smiles at him when he goes to sit next to her and watch monkeys climb the panther.

“I’m not your therapist,” she says and it’s the Sokovian from before, Serbian words and German, and a dash of Hungarian and Russian to round it out and he knows Asset is working overtime to translate it.

“And I’m not yours,” Bucky agrees. “But you seem pretty lucid when we talk."

“It’s getting easier,” Wanda admits. “Steve is away, which helps, and your mind is less tangled. Easier to-” she wiggles fingers at her head “-untangle my thoughts.”

That’s good, he supposes, though he doesn’t know why Steve’s trip off to “go figure [himself] out” was helping.

“He  _ needs _ to go figure himself out,” Wanda says. “He isn’t sure he’s made all the right choices. His head is chaos.”

Oh.

“It’s nice, you and Sam,” she says. “You’re. Loud-sound but quiet-mind. You joke loudly and talk loudly but your minds, even when you’re worrying, it’s quiet.”

Well ‘s good to know his worry isn’t doing her head in.

Wanda grins at that.

She’s good company, he thinks. They don’t need to talk much and when they do there’s an odd clarity - even to the most confused sentences. It helps to get tangled thoughts in order.

It’s overcast. He knows, soon, it’s going to rain. He doesn’t know how to bring up his new tangle to Wanda. She smiles, uncurls.

“Love is like trauma,” she says. “Tangled to understand. And it makes us vulnerable. It’s not easy for us to be vulnerable, after all we’ve all been through, but what happened has made us so and we can’t always control our emotions, so we love. So we have to trust.”

He knows he trusts Sam. Doesn’t mean his mind doesn’t worry.

“So you wait for your trauma to trust him too. Whatever the love. Whatever the trauma. Clint and Pietro, now and then, they are very different. For me, the trust comes slowly. But it comes.”

Love is like trauma. Huh. He’d never thought of it like that before.

 

* * *

 

He waits for his trauma to trust Sam.

He knows he’s got a fuckton of trauma.

 

* * *

 

Sam wakes from a nightmare. Bucky is sprawled on the bed beside him - cohabitation hadn’t been a decision so much as A Thing That Happened - and Sam sits himself upright, slows his breathing.

Beside him, Bucky stirs slowly and his hand clenches under the pillow.

Sam doesn’t really mind that Bucky brings knives to bed. He does mind how quickly Bucky reaches for them.

“Just a nightmare,” he tells Bucky. “S’okay. Go back to sleep.”

Sometimes that makes Bucky wake up more, go “The hell I will,” and bring him coffee. Other times, like tonight, it means Bucky makes snurfly noises before loosening his grip on the knife and going back to sleep.

He’s not figured out that pattern yet. He doesn’t think he ever will.

He knows, in the morning, Bucky will get up before him and leave the knife - sheathed - on the bedside cabinet. That he’ll return with coffee blacker than sin for the both of them and check he’s ok. He does the same thing - minus the knives - when Bucky has nightmares.

He falls asleep and wakes to coffee and a sheathed knife.

 

* * *

 

They’re together and they love each other but it’s not that simple. By choice, they defy categorisation. Love is many things (“Love is like trauma,” Bucky says one day and then explains the analogy) and so is trauma and so is togetherness.

The others know and don’t question it and when Clint makes a joke Bucky smiles, Sam laughs and Wanda, quiet and clear, goes, “It’s not that simple.”

_ Atta girl, _ Bucky thinks.

It’s not that sometimes they’re not together, it’s that sometimes they’re together differently. Sometimes trauma means they love differently or need something different and sometimes they argue-discuss-debate trauma and explore their own. 

It’s not that simple. It doesn’t have to be.

Love, like trauma, needs trust and makes you vulnerable and can be tangled up and hard to avoid. 

“Given we run head first into trauma,” Bucky says, “It’s not surprising we did the same with love.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


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